I purchased a Lenovo x120e and thought I'd share my experience with the world via this forum.

I bought it direct from Lenovo as it was the cheapest I could find via any retailer, and (if I remember correctly) included free shipping.

It arrived within 2 weeks of ordering it, even though it wasn't set to even ship until 4 weeks later.

Also, I ordered it with only 2 gigs of RAM since a 4 gig option was $85 direct, but an 8 gig upgrade via crucial.com was only $45.

I also kept the standard 320gig 72,000RPM drive, opt'ing out of the very expensive SSD option.

For completeness, I also got the optional $20 bluetooth module.

Hardware:
AMD E-350 with the "ATI" HD 6310 video card and 2 gigs of RAM

I personally love Lenovo's "stick" mouse. I have never gotten used to any touchpad mice, including the very large and very nice one included on my previous Asus 1015PN.

The keyboard is huge, and comes with the option of swapping the reversed fn and ctl keys. However, since the keyboard is so big, I have a hard time finding the right one anyway!

The mice (stick and touch) both have their own buttons which are individually turn on/offable which is great for me since I do use the stick mouse most of the time (and its associated buttons), but also like the multi-touch navigation of the touchpad, but often sit with this in my lap. Doing so, I sometimes click the touchpad buttons with my belt, or shirt, but since I can disable that set of buttons, all is well.

The screen does seem to be a bit dark, not as bright or punchy as other laptops I've had, but it is matte, not glossy which is nice.

Some people have complained about the speakers volume and location (underneath shooting down), but I'm sitting here with the speakers on "4" out of a possible 50, and I can hear "The Cars" just fine. At 50, however, it is still clear and crisp...not distorted or over amplified.

The battery is very lack-luster, and unpredictable at times, sometimes reporting 5 hours left, sometimes 2.

There is a Lenovo ThinkVantage tool box that does do some aggressive power control, even showing you how many watts are being consumed at different power settings.

I have a 6-cell battery pack, but would like the option of a 3-cell for shorter periods at the cafe, while giving me a smaller footprint. The 6-cell sticks out as most do. It doesn't seem that the 3-cell is available anymore.

The inner workings are very very easy to get too.

RAM upgrades to 8 gigs which is very impressive for a netbook. There are 2 dimm slots just under the cover, easily removed with 3 screws.

Also very accesable is the hard drive and access to the populated 1/2 height PCIe slot (currently installed is the wireless card); a free full height PCIe slot pre-wired with 2 available antenei); and a "SIM card" slot (I'm not sure the official designation of this type of slot, but it's where a 3g/4g sim module would go).

Lenovo does do something aweful: the BIOS has a whitelist of acceptable wireless cards, so my spare Intel 5300 (or many others) will prevent the machine from even booting since it isn't in Lenovo's whitelist of acceptable cards.

There are (easily found and deployed) BIOS hacks, but I wont go into that here to get around this vendor lock-in.

Just know that this is a designed restriction.

The power button is receced to prevent accidental power changes (I guess) so it's a bit of a nusaince to turn on/off at times.

The keys themselves are nice, no flex in the keyboard and the buttons are responsive. I guess one complaint is that each button does travel up/down quite a bit (not bendy or cheap, they are just very "tall"), so on rare occasions I don't push down far enough to engage the button, but that hasn't happened at all during this writing.

Another keyboard mention: having actual insert, delete, home, end, page up/down keys makes navigation very conveniant (instead of key-combinations).

There is a "low-light" webcam (working, but I haven't used it yet).

The microphone is poorly positioned so that my left palm covers it up most of the time.

HDMI, VGA, multi-card reader, 10/100/1000 NIC, 3 USB ports (one "always on" to charge phones, etc while the netbook is off) and a headphone jack all round out the hardware comments.

I understand this is a Linux site, but so far I've only tested with Windows with any effort and the data below reflects that.

I think I'll skip over the reports while having just 2 gigs of RAM installed since this is a rediculously low amount to have for WIndows 7, let alone a netbook. I will say it was very sluggish navigating around with only 2gigs.

The below numbers are all based on the factory installed hardware and OS image, except for the 8gigs of RAM which is post delivery.

Regardless of the amount, the usable RAM is always slightly lower than installed since (I believe) some is taken for the video card.

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

Cold Boot time: 1 min 10 seconds
Time to get to my google+ page: 15 more seconds

7zip compression of 2.4gigs reported to take 25 minutes at 1600KB/s (slightly improved with more RAM)

Windows Experience numbers:
CPU is the bottle neck at 3.8
RAM 5.7 (4.9 with 2gigs)
Graphics 4.0
Gaming graphics 5.6
HD 5.9
TOTAL: 3.8 (due to CPU)

PassMark value: 558.5 (much improved from the 2gig test: 354.4)

I don't have a good way to test wireless transfer speeds, but it does seem to download from the web at my ISP reported speeds.

Overall performance:

Youtube videos (720p and 1080p) all play very very well NOT full screened.

Big Buck Bunny reports 10 stage fps, 24 video fps, and 20 dropped frames after 30 seconds of play time.

Full screen is a different (disapointing) story:

1080p drops to 10 fps and 100's of dropped frames, and any time an ad pops up or the navigation bar comes up, the whole screen studders and is terrible to the point of unusable. (up to 1000+ dropped frames as I write this).

720p full screen is much more acceptable with 24 fps and very few dropped frames. The reaction of ads and the nav bar are much less obvious, but still present.

Downloaded video:

A "The Walking Dead", 350mb non-HD video played well but several times during the show, the video would slow down for 3 seconds, then play over-fast to catch up.

I have yet to watch a full length 720/1080P so I'm not sure how these will play just yet.

Also note: Windows media played much better than VLC did, even after I enabled the "use GPU" in VLC.

Games:
So far I've only installed Portal 2, which plays very well (each map takes a while to load, but once loaded there is no delay at all) at the default settings. I haven't tried increasing graphic info yet but the game is very playable.

The Lenovo provided image doesn't have much cruft installed, but did come with Chrome!

They push some Norton suite once or twice, and the Office 10 "buy online" comes up once or twice.

The Lenovo ThinkVantage crap is pretty insistant on staying on my taskbar even though I've removed it several times.

It was conveniant to patch everything via that tool, but I get the feeling it is sucking some performance out of my over all experience.

Nothing else specific comes to mind, but I will update this as I load more games, install a fresh copy of Windows, install the Broadcomm Crystal HD card (I'm hoping this perfects my video experiences), and I'll (easily) replace the hard drive and see what Linux can do with this hardware.

Let me know if you have any thing else you'd like me to test or report on.

~Mike